Oldtown Folks

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXIII. WE TAKE A STEP UP IN THE TTORLD. ONE of my most vivid childish remembrances is the length of oar winters, the depth of the snows, the raging fury of tha storms that used to whirl over the old farm-house, shrieking and piping and screaming round each angle and corner, and thundering down the chimney in a way that used to threaten to topple all down before it. The one great central kitchen fire was the only means of warming known in the house, and duly at nine o'clock every night that was raked up, and all the family took their way to bedchambers that never knew a fire, where the very sheets and blankets seemed so full of stinging cold air that they made one's fingers tingle; and where, after getting into bed, there was a prolonged shiver, until one's own internal heat-giving economy had warmed through the whole icy mass. Delicate people had these horrors ameliorated by the application of a brass warming-pan. -- an article of high respect and repute in those days, which the modern conveniences for warmth in our houses have entirely banished. Then came the sleet storms, when the trees bent and creaked under glittering mail of ice, and every sprig and spray of any kind of vr^getatian was reproduced in sparkling crystals. These were cold days par excellence, when everybody talked of the weather as something exciting and tremendous, -- when the cider would freeze in the cellar, and the bread in the milk-room would be like blocks of ice, -- when not a drop of water could be got out of the sealed well, and the very chimney-back over the raked-up fire would be seen in the morning sparkling with a rime of frost crystals. How the sledges used to squeak over the hard snow, and the breath freeze on the hair, and beard, and woolly...